A special collection to preserve content related to the 2021 local elections took place between August and October. The effort resulted in the preservation of 31 million files.
“Thousands of election pages to preserve before they disappear”. This is how the Arquivo.pt defined the mission of its collection project and preservation of content related to the 2021 local elections which took place on September 26th.
“Online information documenting electoral processes is of manifest historical importance. However, it's difficult to identify them because they appear and disappear quickly. In the case of local elections, the number of candidates and the variety of channels used makes the task even more challenging," highlights Arquivo.pt on its website.
For this reason, as in previous elections, Arquivo.pt has launched a special collection to preserve content related to this suffrage. The collection was carried out by manually identifying content by municipality and parish, with the help of several people and organizations.
The process, which took place between August 22 and October 8, 2021, involved the address collection campaign and collaboration with national municipal archive services (in identifying electoral websites and candidates), as well as contact with parties to send the names of candidates at the top of the list.
THE methodology, which had already been applied in the presidential elections (2021) and European elections (2019), also included sources of information such as Wikipedia and the website Eyedata – Social Data Lab, while the automatic searches on Bing with the most relevant content (such as news, campaign initiatives or the official page of your electoral campaign).
The resulting collection called 2021 Local Elections” (EAWP39) rIt brings together 31 million files totaling 2.7 TeraBytes of information and will be available from October 2022, in compliance with the 1-year embargo period. All researchers who wish to conduct studies on the 2021 Local Elections and need to obtain early access to the collected content can contact Arquivo.pt.
